THEY thought of many ways to get him to do it, but none of such
ingenuity as to inspire them with confidence. Mrs. Oliphant made more
suggestions than her husband did, and she put most of them into the form
of little dramatic dialogues imagined as taking place between Mr.
Oliphant and Harlan. Mr. Oliphant was to say such-and-such things to
Harlan, who would necessarily reply in certain terms, which she
sketched;—whereupon his father could triumphantly turn the words just
uttered into proof that Harlan would not only be doing his duty by
helping Dan, but at the same time would make great headway with Martha
Shelby in a straightforward manner involving not the slightest pose.
Unfortunately, after each of these small dramas in turn, becoming eager
in her opinion that “_this_ time” she had “got it,” she was forced into
pessimism by Mr. Oliphant’s pointing out that Harlan wouldn’t say what
she had sketched for him; but, on the contrary, was certain to express
himself to an effect precisely the opposite.
Many times that afternoon the poor lady murmured, “No, I suppose perhaps
it wouldn’t do after all,” and pondered again. “But why don’t you think
of a way that _would_ do?” she asked, with more spirit, after one of her
failures. “You’re a lawyer; you ought to be able to think of
_something_.”
He laughed and made the gesture of a man helpless between opposing
viewpoints of his own. “What provokes me is that I can’t help seeing
Harlan’s side of it, too. There’s a good deal to be said on his side,
you know.”
“Yes, indeed,” she readily assented. “He thinks he’s perfectly right;
but of course he isn’t.”
“Well, why isn’t he? After all, your mother trusted him to do just what
we’re planning to get him not to do.”
“But her will doesn’t _say_ he can’t help Dan. So why shouldn’t he?”
“No,” Mr. Oliphant interrupted; “it doesn’t say he mustn’t; but that’s
what she counted on. In our hearts we’re blaming him for not betraying a
trust, and for being unwilling to put money into the fire;—he honestly
believes it would be putting it into the fire. And he won’t do it, even
though he knows his refusing makes him look mean in the eyes of pretty
much everybody he cares about, even in the eyes of the person he seems
to care most about. Well, there’s something rather fine in a stand like
that, after all.”
“Martha’d never forgive him!” Mrs. Oliphant said emphatically. “Never!
If he doesn’t help Dan, now that he’s got so _much_, she’d always
believe him terribly stingy. So you see we ought to persuade him for his
own good, too—if we could only think of a way.”
But they continued to find that elusive way beset by baffling
afterthoughts; and when Dan came home from his excursion, successful and
in high fettle, they spoke to him of the subject that had been
engrossing them—and were straightway baffled again. Dan even declined
the proffer of future assistance from his mother.
“Not a penny!” he said. “She didn’t have any faith in me, and she
despised the whole idea of Ornaby. She gave me thirty-five hundred
dollars of my own—bless her for it! She gave me that to do with as I
please, and it’s plenty. Why, to-morrow I’m goin’ to fix up the interest
on what’s owed on the land, and then I’ve got to settle another little
matter, and after that I——”
“Wait, Dan,” his father interposed. “What other little matter is it you
have to settle? I didn’t know anything had been worrying you except the
probable foreclosure.”
“It didn’t, sir. I didn’t worry about this at all. I knew I could fix
_it_ all right, if I could just hold off the foreclosure. It seems I’ve
never paid any of the taxes on the Addition—I’ve had so many other
things on my mind, it seems I just kind of neglected that—and so
somebody’s got a tax title to it; but now I can settle with him
to-morrow morning and clear it off—and then I’m goin’ to turn up some
sod out there! I’m goin’ to get ready to lay the foundation for my first
factory!”
“But the _money_, dear!” his mother cried. “How in the world do you
expect even to lay the foundations unless we can get Harlan——”
“No, ma’am! I wouldn’t take a nickel of it if he begged me to! I’ve been
pretty near where I was ready to steal to get money to pull me out of a
hole; but I’ll never take one single cent of what grandma left Harlan,
or of what she left you either. If she’d meant me to have it she’d have
given it to me herself; but she didn’t have any faith in me, and she
says so in plain words in her will. You don’t expect me to take help
from her that she wanted to _prevent_, do you? Never in this world!”
“There! You see?” Mrs. Oliphant lamented, appealing to her husband. “I
knew it hurt him, in spite of what he said. I knew it!”
“You’re all wrong,” Dan stoutly maintained. “She kind of explained to me
what she was goin’ to do, though I didn’t see what she meant. It was
just a few minutes before she died. She told me to remember not to be
hurt, but she needn’t have worried about it, and I told her so. So don’t
_you_ worry about it. I didn’t begin to build Ornaby on my expectations
from her; I’ve carried it along this far by myself, and I expect to
carry it the rest of the way. And I’m goin’ to build that factory!
George McMillan thinks maybe he can float some of the stock for it in
New York, and I don’t know but he’s got a little money of his own he may
want to put in. The way I feel, why, it looks to me as if I was about
ready to climb out on the top o’ the heap right now; and I’m certainly
not baby enough to be hurt because my grandmother didn’t have any faith
in me.”
He continued to protest and perhaps protested too much; for although it
was clear enough to his parents that he was so heartened by his
thirty-five hundred dollars as to anticipate miracles, yet it was not to
be believed that his pride had suffered no injury at all. What appeared
in his grandmother’s will as a severe criticism of his ability and
judgment was more than a mere neutral lack of faith; and Mrs. Oliphant’s
intuition had touched the truth; he was indeed hurt—but he never
admitted it.
Moreover, he remained steadfast in refusal; he would neither allow his
mother to help him with money nor countenance any appeal of hers, or his
father’s, to Harlan. Both of them, uncountenanced, did with faint hope
reopen the subject to Harlan, though they did it indirectly;—they made
allusions to the pathos of the brave and independent position his
brother had taken. But Harlan only looked slightly badgered, and replied
that this extolled position of Dan’s was the only possible correct one
under the circumstances.
From time to time the troubled parents tried other diplomacies of
increasing feebleness, until finally it seemed best to mention the
subject, even indirectly, no more. In the evenings the silences in the
library were charged with feeling withheld from expression; though Dan
enlivened the room when he came in, and made it boisterous if he brought
the baby with him. Certainly no depression could be recorded against
either of this pair; Henry Daniel glowed with health and became livelier
with every month of increasing age and weight. As for Lena, after her
outburst upon the reading of Mrs. Savage’s will, she was another of this
household who was surcharged with repressed feeling; but her repression
became a habit;—weeks went by when she did not slam a door. She
appeared to become more tolerant of her husband at this period than she
had ever been; and when she spoke to him at all, it was in a tone
suggesting that her tolerance had in it something of compassion.
She devoted herself to her baby, perhaps finding a refuge in her
devotion; but she declined to accompany Dan on Sunday afternoons when he
went for a sidewalk excursion with the perambulator. This was an
established custom in the town, she observed: every Sunday, early in the
afternoon, the young fathers and mothers began to appear upon the
sidewalks, the fathers pushing the baby-carriages and the mothers
strolling a little way behind with the toddlers, if there were any of
these, or perhaps lingering for a moment of gossip with friends
encountered by the way, then scurrying on to overtake the perambulator.
High and low followed the custom; it was as well observed by the South
Side, where lived most of the followers of handicrafts, as it was upon
National Avenue and Amberson Boulevard. The perambulators of these two
thoroughfares were the more luxurious; fine lace was to be seen upon the
occupants, and the accompanying parents were well dressed; though Lena,
looking from her window, sometimes shivered to see one of the passing
young husbands wearing a Derby hat as a complement to the long frock
coat that appeared to be a regalia garment necessary to this occasion.
By four o’clock, which was Dan’s favourite hour for his weekly
perambulator stroll, most of the pedestrian families were on their way
homeward from “Sunday dinner at grandpa’s and grandma’s,” the grandma
and grandpa being almost invariably the parents of the young mother.
Lena objected to the parade as “publicly provincial,” and pointed out
that Dan lacked any plausible reason for joining it;—if the baby needed
air he could be taken for a drive in the family carriage; and if Dan
insisted on pushing him in the perambulator, the Oliphants’ back yard
was “twice the size of Madison Square,” she said with elaborate
exaggeration; but Henry Daniel’s father only laughed and continued to
follow the custom of his fellow-townsmen.
The Sunday-afternoon excursion with the perambulator gave him his
greatest happiness, and all through his bustling week days of work he
looked forward to it, chuckling as he thought of it. And when the
rewarding hour arrived, he went forth wheeling his son before him and
cheerily unconscious that he was the only father in sight not
accompanied (even at a distance) by a second parent for the occupant of
the perambulator. He was proud to exhibit Henry Daniel and loved nothing
better than to lift him out of the little carriage and talk uproarious
baby-talk to him, and tickle him to make him laugh, and in every other
possible manner show him off to other young parents—or to anybody who
had time to listen to these hilarious paternal banalities. If other
parents bragged of their own young, showing them off in turn, Dan’s
manifestations with Henry Daniel would become but the louder; and if the
other parents, being two to one, succeeded in drowning him out, he would
restore his child to the perambulator tenderly and move on, sorry for
people who had so little to make such a fuss about.
Sunday, he said, was the only day when he had a chance to get really
acquainted with the baby; for all the rest of the week Dan was out
hustling so early and so late that opportunities for making the
acquaintance more intimate were few. A great part of his activity at
this time was in the chase of possible buyers of Ornaby ground; and a
driven life was led by those three men who had thought they might buy
lots after the foreclosure. The Earl of Ornaby gave them little rest;
and although he sometimes remained away from one or another of them for
days at a time—perhaps upon the ardent request, “Well, for heaven’s
sakes can’t you even give me a chance to think it _over_?”—he would
write frequent letters to the pursued creature in the interval.
Incessantly he persuaded, argued, and prophesied; seldom has a
half-accepted, half-rejected lover shown such hot persistence in
convincing his lady; and probably never have three dismal men in
moderate circumstances been so urgently courted into the buying of lots.
They were not friends, these men; they had gone separately to Ornaby and
had no knowledge of one another when the pursuit of them began; but they
knew one another well before it was over. The vehement salesman had so
quoted them to one another, making such glorifying use of their every
admission not actually condemning Ornaby, that a conference of the
quoted seemed to be a necessity. They thought to meet in secret; but
within ten minutes found the hunter upon them.
“Gentlemen,” he began, “you wish to be alone, and I will not interrupt
you”—and talked until two of them went home.
He went with them, and then returned to talk some more to the man at
whose house the conference had been called.
Such deadly persistence finally prevailed upon a majority of the three
and two more lots were sold in the Addition upon the liberal terms of
nothing down and little more than nothing to be paid in periodical
installments. Nevertheless, here were three actual sales, and if there
ever lived a salesman who knew how to make three appear to be a hundred,
because he himself believed three to be a hundred, that multi-visioned
salesman was Daniel Oliphant.
In a day of quieter art certain academicians now gone from their
academies had frequently the desire to paint pretty young women
blue-robed and poised as if alighting from the air. Sometimes, upon the
lower part of his canvas, beneath the poising lady’s alighting toe, such
a painter would twirl a golden circle, then swathe her eyes with a blue
kerchief and name the picture, “Dame Fortune on her Wheel.” The effect
was of the dame blind, but dancing; and sometimes the course of events
in the life of a human creature will warrant the conception, yet it has
usually been observed that Fortune seldom dances to one who has not
diligently begged the favour. It would seem the blinded lady has a
little bit of her kerchief up.
The man who had built a picnic shack at Ornaby for his large family
found his wife and children so reluctant to come home from the picnics
that he enlarged the shack, put a cooking-stove and cots in it, and
began to stay there from Saturday afternoon until Monday morning. His
house was far down in the city where the smoke had begun to discourage
his wife, and, in the unavailing struggle to keep things clean, she grew
querulous. “If we could only _live_ out here!” she wailed one day when
they were at the shack; and this outcry produced the first house in
Ornaby Addition. It was a cottage of the “New Colonial” kind; and Dan
drove all of his other Ornaby boosters to see every new phase of its
construction, from the digging of the cellar to the polishing of the
floors; for when the cottage was begun the purchasers of land in the
Addition were increased in number to eight. By the time the cottage was
finished there were fourteen, and several of these intended to build
“right the first minute next spring,” Dan said.
He called them his “Ornaby boosters”; for he readily adopted the new
vocabulary of commercial argot then being developed by “promoters,” by
writers of advertisements, and by New York hustlers for trade. “Every
Ornaby buyer is an Ornaby booster,” he said one day, when the new
cottages in the Addition had brought him new buyers of lots; and,
falling instantly in love with the cadence of this alliteration, went
straight to the billboard men. Thereafter no one could go northward of
the city for an afternoon drive and fail to find the gentle landscape
wrecked. On every road the earl blazoned his great defacements: “Every
Ornaby Buyer is an Ornaby Booster!”
At home he had two subjects, both subdivided. One was Henry Daniel, his
growth, his wit, and his precocity; and the other was Ornaby Addition,
its present magnificence and prospective splendour.
“And the queer thing is,” Harlan told Martha Shelby, “he believes every
word of it. He actually still believes he’s making a success of that
dreadful place. Isn’t it strange?”
But Martha said that she knew something stranger, and when he asked her
what it was, she answered: “Why, it’s your still believing he _isn’t_
making a success of the ‘dreadful place.’”